City girl!

Laura suggested I do a race with her.  It the Mount Diablo Marathon has a 4 mile route race.  http://www.coastaltrailruns.com/d_race_info.html

I was a little nervous about the thought of it since I have not really been running hills at all.  I ventured out to the race trek to see if I could really do it.  I had a lot of time to do thinking while I was out there.  I need to say that the entire time I was preoccupied worried about seeing snakes.  If you are new to reading my blog, I have been known to see snakes (sometimes poisonous) on my treks in nature.  You can see old posts about snakes here and here.   Snakes were all I could think about today and it sortof sucked all the enjoyment out of the run/walk.  I would much rather walk through the street of SF at midnight alone then walk through this trail in nature at noon!  I felt very vulnerable!

I did do some thinking on my walk.  I have signed up for a 10K in Nov.  It is the same route I have run and walked a zillion times in SF.  I know I can do that race.  Sadly in Sept this race is 2 miles shorter but I was afraid it was all hills so for some reason I had to go see the trail before I would sign up.  Why can I not have faith that I can train up for the race?  I have 2 months!  I should be able to do it right?

Well I pulled into the parking lot at Mt Diablo state park.  The race goes 2 miles up the trail then you come back on the same trail.  There were 2 park workers i the parking lot so I asked them about the hills for the first 2 miles.  They both said...."oh piece of cake.....its flat for the first 2 miles!"  Feeling a bit better about what was ahead of me I started out...running.  I had my ipod going with music trying to drown out the sounds of nature that I might mistake for a snake in the grass beside me.  

Piece of cake my ass!!  It was hills for 2 miles.  I only ran about 1/3 of the first 2 miles uphill.  Pathetic!  I ran probably 2/3 of the way back but the downhill was starting to kill my knees so I stopped running.  Arg!  I am going to have to go running here quite a few times to get in shape for this....or perhaps I will go to SF and run hills there, where there are NO snakes (not slithery ones anyways).  

The run was very pretty when I allowed myself to enjoy it.  I even snapped a couple pictures.  I think I would enjoy it much more with someone that could help me keep my mind off the animals in the brush or help me problem solve incase I did run into one!

So here is the pretty run I did.  If you are a nature person enjoy them.  If you are a city person....I will post some new pictures of the city soon!

Murn